Kanga seemed entirely at peace as Tarek knelt by his side with the knife. He gazed up at the stars overhead.

“I think we might have been good friends if I didn’t hate you so much,” Kanga mused.

Tarek was taken aback. “We were never friends. Not even a little.”

“You never know,” he said. “Every now and then, I thought, maybe…” Tarek felt a welter of anger, wistfulness, and longing skitter across Kanga’s heart for the barest moment.  “Forget it. You look like a fool with that thing strapped to your face. Did I break your nose or something?”

“Shut up,” Tarek said. “Don’t talk.”

“You want me to make this easy for you? Tough nuts, grub. I want you to look in my eyes as you shove the knife into my chest. I want to see you cry because you’ll never be the man that I am. I want it to hurt.”

“You’re crazy.”

Kanga lunged against his bonds, arching his chest to try to make contact with the knife. “Do it!” he bellowed. “Do it!”

There was no other choice to be made. Kanga had to die. Tarek put both hands on the hilt, reared up on his haunches to get good leverage, and put the point of the blade over Kanga’s heart. The hunter quieted as the knife came into position.

“Look at me,” he whispered. “Look.”

Tarek did.

“If it can’t be me killing you, I’m glad it’s you killing me. It’s the way it should be.”

Tarek closed his eyes, wishing he could shut out the incomprehensible gratitude and love he felt from the man. He let his weight fall forward so the knife would plunge into Kanga’s heart.

Except it didn’t.

Tarek opened his eyes, feeling a strange resistance underneath himself. The knife hadn’t moved. Despite all of his weight on top of the knife, it wasn’t so much as dimpling the fur of Kanga’s leathers.

Kanga was staring at him. “Oh, grub. Can’t you even do this one thing right?”

Tarek pushed with his arms, shifted his weight back and forth, backed off, chose a different spot, and tried again. The knife’s tip got no closer to Kanga than the width of a blade of grass. Kneeling back, he reversed his grip and stabbed downward at Kanga’s torso with all his strength. Once again, the knife stopped short. He slashed and poked and sliced. Nothing worked. No matter what he did, his arms stopped the moment he was about to pierce the man’s skin.

Kanga watched the whole process with detached interest. “This just keeps getting weirder.”

Tarek ignored him and looked to his friends. “I don’t think I can hurt him.”

“Don’t feel bad,” Bachi said. “I wouldn’t be able to, either.”

“No,” Tarek protested. “I’m trying to. I think my magic won’t let me hurt him now that our blood has mixed.”

“That would have been nice to know a little while ago,” Tavi said.

The pale woman strode up and held out her hand. “Give it to me. I said from the first I would do it. Let us be done. I still want to sleep more before it gets light.”

“Hold on,” Tarek said, holding the knife away from her.

Anger flashed across her face. “Are you the Land’s greatest fool?”

“Yes,” murmured Pahtl.

“Yes,” echoed Kanga.

“Shut up!” she flared at Kanga before turning her gaze back to Tarek. “He needs to die, and you can’t kill him. Give me the knife.”

“But if I can’t hurt him, then I don’t think he can hurt me.”

She pointed to the blood drying on his chest. “He just did! I saw it! Did you hit your head and forget I had to save you just now?”

“That was before he tasted my blood. It destroyed my hold on him, but I think it changed us so we can’t hurt each other, either.”

“You can’t just think someone might not hurt you. You have to know it.” The woman batted a stray curl out of her face. “Anything else is just a slow way of slitting your own throat.”

“There’s an easy way to test it,” Kanga said. “Give me the knife and we’ll find out real quick.”

“You don’t get a say in this,” Bachi scowled.

“How’s that finger, little man?”

Bachi bared his teeth and kicked the trussed-up hunter in the leg. “Shut your mouth or I’ll break one of yours.”

Kanga offered up his pointer finger as best he could with bound hands. “Nobody’s stopping you.”

Bachi hesitated, half-knelt as if to grab the offered digit, blanched, and stormed off into the darkness cursing under his breath. Kanga laughed mockingly as he retreated.

“You’re awful,” Tarek said. “You’re the worst person I’ve ever met. You deserve every bad thing I can think of. But if I tell her to kill you, I’m still responsible.”

Kanga sucked air through his bleached teeth, unmoved. “That sounds real nice, grub – very wise, very moral. Remind me, who drank whose blood first?”

Tarek imagined punching him in the nose and realized with dismay he’d never have that pleasure again. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to speak calmly. “If I could undo that, I would, for so many different reasons. But right now, this is the best I can do.”

He placed his knife in Kanga’s still-prisoned hand and extended his palm just beyond the tip of the blade. Tavi gave a little sigh and Pahtl let out an inarticulate sound of protest, but he gave them both a look that pleaded for patience before glancing back to Kanga. “Cut me. Make it hurt.”

Kanga snorted, shrugged, and drove the knife as hard as he could in his awkward position toward Tarek’s hand. Tarek didn’t even flinch. The blade never touched his skin.

Kanga frowned at his disobedient hands, placing them both on the butt of the leather-wrapped hilt, trying to force it home. Nothing. He grunted and thrashed, but the blade stayed still.

“Why?” Kanga shrieked. “I want to kill you! What have you done to me?”

“I’ve made you harmless,” Tarek replied.

With a crazed snarl, Kanga flipped the knife around so that it pointed toward himself and tried to plunge it into his own heart. Shocked, Tarek reached for him, knowing he’d never be able to stop him in time.

There was no need. The blade stopped abruptly just as it had when Tarek had attempted the same thing. Two, three, four times Kanga stabbed at himself, never making a mark. He gave a bestial scream of rage and twisted his body, throwing the knife into the campfire embers. Tavi cursed and scrambled to fetch a stick to rescue the valuable implement from the flames.

“Wormshit,” Kanga said hoarsely. “You’ve killed me, and I can’t even finish the job.”

“I should have guessed,” Tarek whispered. “You’ve got my blood now. It seems very… self-protective.”

“You’ve made me tainted just like they said. I can’t ever go back.”

“I didn’t force you to taste my blood,” Tarek reminded him.

“Shut up,” he groaned, turning away. “Go away.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” Tarek said. He left the despondent hunter on the ground and pulled the cloth-and-otter-hair breathing mask from his face. He gestured to the others to gather well away from where Kanga lay. Bachi had wandered back into the dim light and joined them.

“He can’t hurt me, but I have no doubt he’d love to hurt any of you,” he told them.

Bachi, who was splinting his own broken finger with sticks and guaro twine as he listened, harrumphed and glared at him meaningfully.

“Hurt you more,” Tarek amended. “We’ll leave him tied to a tree and give him a couple of stones. Eventually he’ll be able to knap a stone edge that will let him cut himself free. We’ll be long gone by then.”

“He will follow,” Pahtl said.

“I don’t think so,” Tarek said. “He only wanted to hurt me. To win. And now he can’t.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Tavi asked.

“If I see his face again, I will kill him whether you will it or no,” the pale woman said gravely.

“We’ll tell him that.” Tarek said. “I think he’ll believe it.”

“I’ll gather our things,” Bachi said. “The sooner we’re gone, the better.”

Tarek looked from one face to the next in the dim light, feeling a surge of gratitude for this odd little group that had grown up around him. “I’m sorry I brought this on you all. But thank you for your help.”

“You are very stupid,” Pahtl said, “but you are not boring.”

“If I’d have known what my Song quest was going to be like, I’d have punched the elder in the face and gone back home,” Bachi admitted before walking away.

Tarek considered the pale woman. “You’ve eaten my food and saved my life. We’re practically tribe now. Will you please tell me your name?”

She scuffed her toe in the dirt and thought about it. “The Shinsok called me dead girl. Sin-eater. Or sometimes ghost.”

“But those aren’t your name,” Tavi protested.

She shrugged, still looking at the ground. “They found me as a baby. I was strapped to my father’s back when he staggered into their village and died. He didn’t bother to give a name.”

Tarek felt a pang of sympathy for her. “You must have picked one somewhere along the way. What do you call yourself?”

She peered at him suspiciously, deep pools of green catching the last of the dying light of the fire. “Why?”

He smiled. “If we’re going to travel together, I’d like to be able to say something other than ‘Hey, you.’”

“I am not travelling with you,” she said. “We have discussed this.”

“It was wrong of me to say you couldn’t come, and I’m sorry. Please – if you’re going where we’re going, let’s help each other and go together. I owe you my life. It’s the least I can do. Not to mention that you’re a lot better in a fight than I ever would have guessed.”

That brought a fierce grin to her face, though she schooled her expression back to its usual glare within a heartbeat. “Very well. If you teach me how to hunt.”

Tarek nodded. “I’d be happy to.”

She turned her back. “I will be ready to leave when you are.”

He opened his mouth to press for her name again but then thought better of it. “Right.”

She paused at the edge of the light and looked back. “Zulimaya.” She looked as if she were daring them to laugh.

Tarek inclined his head gravely. The flowers of the zulimaya bush had bright orange petals and a white heart. They were also deathly poisonous. “It’s a very good name.”

Then she was gone. Tarek wondered how such a tall woman with such bright coloring managed to be so stealthy.

Tavi nudged him. “We should have just let her come in the first place.”

“You’re probably right.”

“I am the smart one.”

Tarek put an arm around his brother’s shoulders and pulled him in close. “Are you all right?”

“He didn’t hurt me.” He turned and gave his brother and appraising glance. “Though if he had, turns out you can just smear a little blood on me and make it better.”

Tarek shook his head at the memory of seeing Kanga’s wounds bind themselves together. “I’d do it in a heartbeat, but how about let’s just not get hurt in the first place?”

“Look at that: a good idea from Tarek!”

Tarek jostled him playfully and they shared a moment of companionable silence.

“We probably should have let her kill him,” Tavi finally said.

“Maybe,” Tarek mused. “But maybe not. And once it’s done, there’s no un-doing it.”

“That’s sort of the point,” Tavi grumbled.

“I don’t want to be a killer,” Tarek said quietly. “That’s what this whole mess is about, isn’t it? Not being the man you saw with blood on his face that day.”

Tavi heaved a mighty sigh. “Tarek, the blood magic…”

“I’m getting rid of it. We’re so close now.”

“I know, but…”

“A few healed cuts don’t make up for what I did, for what it cost. If you and Pahtl hadn’t stopped me tonight it would have been the same thing all over again. You know that.”

Tavi was quiet for a long moment. “I do.”

“Good. Then let’s not question the one truly good decision I’ve made.” He clapped his brother on the shoulder. “Instead, let’s go tie up our ugly river rat and get moving.”